American Humor.

Tall tales and humorous sketches depicting life along the frontier of the Old Southwest flourished from the 1820s until the Civil War. Characterized by comic exaggeration and vernacular language, reveling in superhuman feats and hoaxes, these tales popularized a uniquely American brand of literary humor. In response to European and Eastern travelers who depicted Westerners as crude illiterates living in squalor, these humorists celebrated the rugged frontier with flourish and extravagance. At the same time, they often parodied the naivete of greenhorns and the hypocrisy of authority figures. In this way tall tales became expressions of regional and national identity.

The Tall Tales.

The tall tale, according to the literary scholar Carolyn S. Brown, is a "comic fiction disguised as fact, deliberately exaggerated to the limits of credibility." Or, as the scholar Walter Hill puts it...